Page 261 - Hunter - The Vigil

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C CHAPTER FIVE: STORYTELLING
ing the righteous fi ght, gathering great knowledge. Candle in monster. The light takes many forms and intensities. Every
hand, halo around the head. hunter carries his candle differently.
For some, it’s true. And most certainly believe it’s true. Few
hunters last long on the Vigil without thinking themselves just, Of Mystery and Horror
without believing their hunt tried and true. Sadly, they can’t Mystery and horror create the Vigil, and they spur it on
all be righteous, can’t all be heroes. Many are selfi sh. Others ceaselessly. The World of Darkness bleeds out, revealing ele-
are cruel. A lot go mad. Plainly stated, hunters are a fucked-up ments of the awful (horror) and elements of the weird (mys-
bunch. Considering what most of them have seen and done, tery). Both of these aspects drive hunters.
though, can you blame them? A teenage girl loses hours of her Think about it. Horror is a confrontation with the
life and wakes up in her bathtub with a tattoo of three dots wretched and grotesque, an in-your-face look of a deformed
on her hand and later learns that she’s pregnant? A husband vampire using someone’s neck-blood like a water fountain or
watches the respirators hiss and click as they provide his wife a rampaging beast tearing through a mall crowd right toward
and children with breath for weeks after they were put in the you. A half-decayed corpse stumbling around, its limbs tugged
hospital by some red-eyed, needle-mouthed thing? A business by puppet strings made from spider web? An ogrish oni out of
executive takes a meeting one day where a passel of her uncles Japanese myth gnawing on one bloody bone while sitting atop
and aunts tell her that she’s got the blood of the Devil in her a nest made of skeletons? A beautiful woman who peels off
and, would she like to come to Milan and oh, sorry, her water her face to reveal a dozen littler faces beneath, some of them
is spiked with Rohypnol? After experiences like that, how can cackling, some of them crying? Shock. Revulsion. Horror.
you not be just a teensy-tiny bit fucked in the head? How does horror drive the hunt? Easy. A character can’t
But still, even the most selfish, most damaged, most ob- deny it. Can’t stomach it. Will not suffer it to live. When the

sessed hunters still bring a light to the shadows. Some carry candle’s light shines on something so awful it sears itself into
the small candle, illuminating one patch of darkness (or one one’s memory, it sometimes seems the only way to scrub clean
page of a mysterious book) at a time. Others carry a burning the mind is to do something, to take action against it.
torch with which they’ll burn the forest down until the mon- Hunter is certainly a game of horror, and the Vigil

sters flee the conflagration. The most broken of the bunch is a horrific duty, no matter how prepared someone is

come to the hunt with the light of a goddamn bomb, white or how much government funding they’ve got propping

and hot and swift, taking out five innocents for every one them up. A decent encounter with the supernatural

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